Tender is the Night

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

“Hi!” to them, or speaking only to one of them. He felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain concealed; that one could parade a casualness into his presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived.

Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: “I reckon I’m late – the beyed has flown.” Dick had to wrench something out of himself before he could forgive him for not having first complimented Nicole.

She left almost immediately and he sat with Collis, finishing the last of his wine. He rather liked Collis – he was “postwar”; less difficult than most of the Southerners he had known at New Haven a decade previously. Dick listened with amusement to the conversation that accompanied the slow, profound stuffing of a pipe. In the early afternoon children and nurses were trekking into the Luxembourg Gardens; it was the first time in months that Dick had let this part of the day out of his hands.

Suddenly his blood ran cold as he realized the content of Collis’s confidential monologue.

“ – she’s not so cold as you’d probably think. I admit I thought she was cold for a long time. But she got into a jam with a friend of mine going from New York to Chicago at Easter – a boy named Hillis she thought was pretty nutsey at New Haven – she had a compartment with a cousin of mine but she and Hillis wanted to be alone, so in the afternoon my cousin came and played cards in our compartment. Well, after about two hours we went back and there was Rosemary and Bill Hillis standing in the vestibule arguing with the conductor – Rosemary white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door

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and pulled down the blinds and I guess there was some heavy stuff going on when the conductor came for the tickets and knocked on the door. They thought it was us kidding them and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was plenty sore. He asked Hillis if that was his compartment and whether he and Rosemary were married that they locked the door, and Hillis lost his temper trying to explain there was nothing wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Rosemary and he wanted him to fight, but that conductor could have made trouble – and believe me I had an awful time smoothing it over.”

With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair’s community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

–Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

–Please do. It’s too light in here.

Collis Clay was now speaking about fraternity politics at New Haven, in the same tone, with the same emphasis. Dick had gathered that he was in love with Rosemary in some curious way Dick could not have understood. The affair with Hillis seemed to have made no emotional impression on Collis save to give him the joyful conviction that Rosemary was “human.”

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“Bones got a wonderful crowd,” he said. “We all did, as a matter of fact. New Haven’s so big now the sad thing is the men we have to leave out.”

–Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

–Please do. It’s too light in here.

. . . Dick went over Paris to his bank – writing a check, he looked along the row of men at the desks deciding to which one he would present it for an O.K. As he wrote he engrossed himself in the material act, examining meticulously the pen, writing laboriously upon the high glass-topped desk. Once he raised glazed eyes to look toward the mail department, then glazed his spirit again by concentration upon the objects he dealt with.

Still he failed to decide to whom the check should be presented, which man in the line would guess least of the unhappy predicament in which he found himself and, also, which one would be least likely to talk. There was Perrin, the suave New Yorker, who had asked him to luncheons at the American Club, there was Casasus, the Spaniard, with whom he usually discussed a mutual friend in spite of the fact that the friend had passed out of his life a dozen years before; there was Muchhause, who always asked him whether he wanted to draw upon his wife’s money or his own.

As he entered the amount on the stub, and drew two lines under it, he decided to go to Pierce, who was young and for whom he would have to put on only a small show. It was often easier to give a show than to watch one.

He went to the mail desk first – as the woman who served him pushed up with her bosom a piece of paper that had nearly escaped the desk, he thought how differently women use their

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bodies from men. He took his letters aside to open: There was a bill for seventeen psychiatric books from a German concern, a bill from Brentano’s, a letter from Buffalo from his father, in a handwriting that year by year became more indecipherable; there was a card from Tommy Barban postmarked Fez and bearing a facetious communication; there were letters from doctors in Zurich, both in German; a disputed bill from a plasterer in Cannes; a bill from a furniture maker; a letter from the publisher of a medical journal in Baltimore, miscellaneous announcements and an invitation to a showing of pictures by an incipient artist; also there were three letters for Nicole, and a letter for Rosemary sent in his care.

– Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

He went toward Pierce but he was engaged with a woman, and Dick saw with his heels that he would have to present his check to Casasus at the next desk, who was free.

“How are you, Diver?” Casasus was genial. He stood up, his mustache spreading with his smile. “We were talking about Featherstone the other day and I thought of you – he’s out in California now.”

Dick widened his eyes and bent forward a little. “In California?”

“That’s what I heard.”

Dick held the check poised; to focus the attention of Casasus upon it he looked toward Pierce’s desk, holding the latter for a moment in a friendly eye-play conditioned by an old joke of three years before when Pierce had been involved with a Lithuanian countess. Pierce played up with a grin until Casasus had authorized the check and had no further recourse

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to detain Dick, whom he liked, than to stand up holding his pince-nez and repeat, “Yes, he’s in California.”

Meanwhile Dick had seen that Perrin, at the head of the line of desks, was in conversation with the heavyweight champion of the world; from a sidesweep of Perrin’s eye Dick saw that he was considering calling him over and introducing him, but that he finally decided against it.

Cutting across the social mood of Casasus with the intensity he had accumulated at the glass desk – which is to say he looked hard at the check, studying it, and then fixed his eyes on grave problems beyond the first marble pillar to the right of the banker’s head and made a business of shifting the cane, hat, and letters he carried – he said good-by and went out. He had long ago purchased the doorman; his taxi sprang to the curb.

“I want to go to the Films Par Excellence Studio – it’s on a little street in Passy. Go to the Muette. I’ll direct you from there.”

He was rendered so uncertain by the events of the last for- ty-eight hours that he was not even sure of what he wanted to do; he paid off the taxi at the Muette and walked in the direction of the studio, crossing to the opposite side of the street before he came to the building. Dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories, he was yet swayed and driven as an animal. Dignity could come only with an overthrowing of his past, of the effort of the last six years. He went briskly around the block with the fatuousness of one of Tarkington’s adolescents, hurrying at the blind places lest he miss Rosemary’s coming out of the studio. It was a melancholy neighborhood. Next door to the place he saw a sign: “1000 chemises.”

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The shirts filled the window, piled, cravated, stuffed, or draped with shoddy grace on the showcase floor: “1000 chemises” – count them! On either side he read: “Papeterie,” “Pâtisserie,” “Solde,” “Réclame” – and Constance Talmadge in “Déjeuner de Soleil,” and farther away there were more sombre announcements: “Vêtements Ecclésiastiques,” “Déclaration de Décès” and “Pompes Funèbres.” Life and death.

He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life – it was out of line with everything that had preceded it – even out of line with what effect he might hope to produce upon Rosemary. Rosemary saw him always as a model of correctness – his presence walking around this block was an intrusion. But Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt-sleeve fitting his wrist and his coat sleeve encasing his shirt-sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar molded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut exactly, his hand holding his small briefcase like a dandy – just as another man once found it necessary to stand in front of a church in Ferrara, in sackcloth and ashes. Dick was paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated.

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CHAPTER XXI

After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity – we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth – a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres – in such places, at any

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rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons – in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood.

“How do you like Paris, Buddy?”

Not waiting for an answer the man tried to fit in his footsteps with Dick’s: “Where you from?” he asked encouragingly.

“From Buffalo.”

“I’m from San Antone – but I been over here since the war.”

“You in the army?”

“I’ll say I was. Eighty-fourth Division – ever heard of that outfit?”

The man walked a little ahead of him and fixed him with eyes that were practically menacing.

“Staying in Paris awhile, Buddy? Or just passing through.” “Passing through.”

“What hotel you staying at?”

Dick had begun laughing to himself – the party had the intention of rifling his room that night. His thoughts were read apparently without self-consciousness.

“With a build like yours you oughtn’t to be afraid of me, Buddy. There’s a lot of bums around just laying for American tourists, but you needn’t be afraid of me.”

Becoming bored, Dick stopped walking: “I just wonder why you’ve got so much time to waste.”

“I’m in business here in Paris.” “In what line?”

“Selling papers.”

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The contrast between the formidable manner and the mild profession was absurd – but the man amended it with:

“Don’t worry; I made plenty money last year – ten or twenty francs for a Sunny Times that cost six.”

He produced a newspaper clipping from a rusty wallet and passed it over to one who had become a fellow stroller – the cartoon showed a stream of Americans pouring from the gangplank of a liner freighted with gold.

“Two hundred thousand – spending ten million a summer.”

“What you doing out here in Passy?”

His companion looked around cautiously. “Movies,” he said darkly. “They got an American studio over there. And they need guys can speak English. I’m waiting for a break.”

Dick shook him off quickly and firmly.

It had become apparent that Rosemary either had escaped on one of his early circuits of the block or else had left before he came into the neighborhood; he went into the bistro on the corner, bought a lead disk and, squeezed in an alcove between the kitchen and the foul toilet, he called the Roi George. He recognized Cheyne-Stokes tendencies in his respiration – but like everything the symptom served only to turn him in toward his emotion. He gave the number of the hotel; then stood holding the phone and staring into the café; after a long while a strange little voice said hello.

“This is Dick – I had to call you.”

A pause from her – then bravely, and in key with his emotion: “I’m glad you did.”

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“I came to meet you at your studio – I’m out in Passy across the way from it. I thought maybe we’d ride around through the Bois.”

“Oh, I only stayed there a minute! I’m so sorry.” A silence. “Rosemary.”

“Yes, Dick.”

“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent – things get difficult.” “You’re not middle-aged, Dick – you’re the youngest per-

son in the world.”

“Rosemary?” Silence while he stared at a shelf that held the humbler poisons of France – bottles of Otard, Rhum St. James, Marie Brizzard, Punch Orangeade, André Fernet Blanco, Cherry Rochet, and Armagnac.

“Are you alone?”

– Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

“Who do you think I’d be with?”

“That’s the state I’m in. I’d like to be with you now.” Silence, then a sigh and an answer. “I wish you were with

me now.”

There was the hotel room where she lay behind a telephone number, and little gusts of music wailed around her –

“And two – for tea. And me for you, And you for me Alow-own.”

There was the remembered dust of powder over her tan – when he kissed her face it was damp around the corners of her

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